American Indian affairs are much in the public mind today—hotly contested debates over such issues as Indian fishing rights, land claims, and reservation gambling hold our attention. While the unique legal status of American Indians rests on the historical treaty relationship between Indian tribes and the federal government, until now there has been no comprehensive history of these treaties and their role in American life.
Francis Paul Prucha, a leading authority on the history of American Indian affairs, argues that the treaties were a political anomaly from the very beginning. The term "treaty" implies a contract between sovereign independent nations, yet Indians were always in a position of inequality and dependence as negotiators, a fact that complicates their current attempts to regain their rights and tribal sovereignty.
Prucha's impeccably researched book, based on a close analysis of every treaty, makes possible a thorough understanding of a legal dilemma whose legacy is so palpably felt today.
The Indians in American Society From the Revolutionary War to the Present
About the Book
Reviews
"Prucha . . . has tried to write a dispassionate history, and in these four succinct and readable essays he succeeds in a way that partisans cannot."—New York Times
"A most significant book. If the role of the historian is to deduce patterns and derive meaning by judicious and objective analysis, this volume constitutes a tour de force. No student of American Indian, American western, or American history should fail to examine it."—Western Historical Quarterly
"This small book is full of insights. . . . Prucha's view of the steady persistence of white paternalism and Indian dependency casts the historical complexities and ambiguities of federal Indian policy in a new light that seeks to avoid swampy polemics and preachy judgments. His book lets us better understand why the place of the Indian in American society raises questions that still confound us."—New England Quarterly
"An excellent overview of U.S. Indian policy. Fr. Prucha makes a strong case for tribal self-sufficiency."—Christian Science Monitor
"A useful, stimulating synthesis of a mature scholar's interpretations of two centuries of American Indian Policy. . . . which the educated public and American historians will appreciate."—American Indian Quarterly
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Abbreviations Used in Footnotes
Introduction: The Anomaly of Indian Treaties
PART ONE. A TREATY SYSTEM
1. The Revolutionary War Years
2. Treaties of Peace after the Revolution
3. Treaty-Making Procedures under the Constitution
4. Confirming the Procedures: Other Treaties in the 1790s
PART TWO. INSTRUMENTS OF FEDERAL POLICY
5. Testing the Treaty System: 1800 to the War of 1812
6. A Position of Dominance: The War of 1812 and After
7. Indian Removal and the Debate about Treaty Making
8. The Removal Period in the North
9. Patterns in Treaty Making
10. Treaties in the Expanding West
11. The Civil War Decade
PART THREE. DETERIORATION
12. The End of Treaty Making
13. Treaty Substitutes
14. The Collapse of the Treaty System
PART FOUR. RENEWAL: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
15. Treaties in the New Century
16. Treaties before the Supreme Court
17. Treaty-Rights Activism
Appendices
Index
Picture Credits
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